J. Gresham Machen Bibliography

Transcription

Alan Strange: Good morning. It’s good to see all of you. I’m just sorry for you that you have to see me, that you have to look at me. Okay. I’ll give you the $10, Kathy. I promise. I promise. Such a beautiful name. That’s my wife’s name. What’s that? A k? You’re a c. I noticed just a few verses here in Galatians 5. A few things emblematic of some of the work and emphasis of John Gresham Machen. Verse 1. For freedom, Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. And then verse 13. For you were called to freedom, brothers only. Do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

It’s been good to be here with you in this time. Together we began the work that I was doing among you, the lectures that I had among you, with a talk about someone who is as contemporary to us as anyone. We’ve spoken about a 20th century figure, Cornelius Ventil. And what we saw, particularly as we thought about Cornelius Ventil, was that he sought to apply in apologetics some of the insights that Calvin had gleaned from Augustine, Anselm and others. That particular insight, that gospel insight, that fundamental insight that all is rooted and grounded in God and his Word. And Ventil sought to be, we might say consistently Calvinistic in his application of that.

But we step back and looked at Calvin, one of the obvious human sources of this and whose 500th birthday we celebrate. So we thought about Calvin and his life. And then we looked at a 19th century figure, Charles Hodge, who sought to be in his time faithful to Calvinism. And Edwards. We heard about him seeking to do that. And then we heard about Hodge and Jaredot seeking in their own times to be faithful to this calling.

And I’d like us to think now about John Gresham Machen, who sought in his time, who sought in that bridge between the 19th and end of the 20th century to be faithful to the testimony once for all delivered to the saints. And in this respect we would agree with our Baptist friend Spurgeon, who says that Calvinism, now, he didn’t mean it as fully as we would want to mean it, but Calvinism is but a nickname for the gospel. We don’t believe that there is a gospel core and then there’s Calvinism. We think Calvinism is seeking to be expressive of the heart of the the gospel. And Consistent to it.

Well, you’ve already seen a little bit now here about our good Dr. John Gresham. That’s the way you do pronounce that name. I’m not having a funny lisp or something. It isn’t pronounced Gresham just so you think I’m lisping or something like that. It’s Gresham Machen. And his dates are 1881 to 1937. He was not only the single most important figure in the formation of the OPC, but was also perhaps the greatest defender of true Christianity in the early part of the 20th century.

But the Machen that so many of us in the OPC have come to know and love fewer and fewer personally, I don’t think there are any in this room. Now I look around, there are still some among us who knew him personally, but fewer and fewer. Of course, as that stalwart defender of the faith against liberalism, this Dr. Machen, who was such a defender of the faith, didn’t appear on the scene as a champion fully formed as Athena sprung from the head of Zeus. No, the machen of the 1920s and the 1930s, who was the great defender of God’s word and its certainty of a vigorous and invigorated reinvigorated Calvinism, did not come to such certainty and assurance without a struggle.

And I think it’s helpful particularly to talk about him, because we saw in Ventil this consistent Calvinism. And if you read Ventil, you could well get the impression that. That he has no doubts, that he never had any doubts. And if you look at earlier figures, you see that they’re involved in this struggle. But Machen is really in the crux of the struggle with modernism. And he felt the allure of modernism, and he saw it in a certain sense, you might say, from the inside. And he resisted it and rejected it.

Machen attained the unshakable convictions for which we know him about the veracity, necessity and. And sufficiency of Scripture. Only after traversing the dark waters of biblical criticism, historicism and modernism. We’ll talk more about these things. Machen looked Modernism in the face, sensed its attraction to sinful human flesh, and by the grace of God, rejected it and wholeheartedly embraced the infallibility of of God’s matchless word.

Machen resisted the modernistic and rejected the modernistic claim that man is the proper judge of the Word, and embraced the truth that God in his Word is our judge. He could confess this with joy because he had discovered that not only is God our Judge and not we his, but also that God has restored us sinners to himself in Christ so that those who trust in Christ alone discover God to be no longer their judge. To use the language of Calvin, this is his language, but their Father. And it was for these truths and this joy that J. Gressem Machen gave his life.

All the faculty members at Westminster have these official portraits for which they set. And that was Dr. Machen’s. Here is the side porch of Machen and there is Dr. T.R. troxell standing on. No, I’m just kidding. He is kind of tall. I know what Troxell is thinking. I know how he thinks. He’s thinking I’m more handsome than that guy is. I know what he’s thinking. I hope nobody knows who that is.

Considering the privileged birth of of J. Gresham Machen and his patrician family in post civil war Baltimore, it was by no means a foregone conclusion that Machen would prove willing to suffer with the people of God rather than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season. Machen, enjoying silver spoon in mouth as he did, may well have rejected any association with the despised fundamentalists of the early 20th century, preferring instead the cultured despisers of Christianity to the old paths of the tried and true faith.

Machen partook, you see, of an education that may well have moved him in the direction of unbelief were it not for the grace of God and on the human side the instruction of his parents. And I’m going to look at Kathy and particularly the prayers of his mother, particularly. And Machen never married, so he had a particularly close relationship and much is revealed of his heart and thought in his letters to his mother. So if you hear me quoting his mother, what did he say to his wife? Nothing. He didn’t have one.

As D.G. hart wrote, born the second of three sons to a prominent Baltimore lawyer, Machen was reared in an old school Presbyterian home of genteel tastes. Remaining in Baltimore for his undergraduate education, he majored in classics at one of these new universities that was particularly for graduate studies, Johns Hopkins, and was graduated from there in 1901. He stayed at Hopkins another year, unable to resist undertaking graduate study with Hopkins great classicist, the renowned American classicist, Basil L. Gildersleeve. That sounds like somebody from central casting. And of course the Gildersleeve family were significant.

But he studied with Basil L. Gildersleeve. He was enrolled at Princeton Theological Seminary the next year, which at that point now is the only remaining bastion of orthodoxy. In the PCUSA, the other seminaries in the Northern church have largely. They’ve gone in some measure liberal, if not entirely so, thus securing, as you might think, since he goes to Princeton, his doctrinal soundness. But this is not going to deliver him from his struggles altogether. He also earned at the same time a master’s degree in philosophy from the university in 1904, while getting his divinity degree in 1905. So he worked at the university and got a master’s of philosophy and also got a divinity degree a year later from the theological seminary.

Thankfully, Machen did come under the strong influence of. Of Francis L. Patton, who was president of the college or the university. It wasn’t yet such, but president of Princeton and then the seminary. Francis L. Patton was a great influence. He spent a lot of time in his home. And then also Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, the brilliant professor of didactic and polemical theology, both of whom encouraged him and direction of orthodoxy. So here is Machen there, you say, well, he’s just. He’s a student in the university, but yet he’s close to Patton and Warfield, arguably the most renowned member of the faculty there at Princeton.

Just reminding you Machen was from a rather significant family, a family through both his father and mother that had significant connections with a number of families, including that of Woodrow Wilson who was in his home. According to some accounts, they were happy when he went from being the president, the governor of New Jersey, from being the president of Princeton to the Governor of New Jersey because that got him out of Princeton and then when he went to Washington because that got him out of New Jersey. But there are some interesting tales there. Suffice it to say that Mr. Wilson’s politics and those of Machen didn’t precisely coincide.

Machen’s mentor in New Testament, William Park Armstrong, New Testament becoming his main discipline, also encouraged him in the truth. So there was Patton and Warfield and William Park Armstrong. Now Machen, as he was taking this degree in 04, the 2 degrees in 04 and 05, was somewhat unsure of himself and uncertain. He wasn’t sure whether he particularly enjoyed a ministerial call. You have to understand, I mean everyone was telling him that he did and he must and he ought to. He was being told by everyone, well, clearly you’re being called to this. And he was the kind of student he was a scholarships to. He was an honor student, a top student, very apt, obviously a brilliant man. And he was being groomed to teach at the seminary and that was communicated to him and of course, if you’re going to teach at Princeton, you’re going to enter the professorial ranks. You’ll have to be ordained and brought into ministerial office and approved as a teacher here.

Machen was not so sure about all of that. At Armstrong’s urging, as Armstrong appreciated his New Testament mentor, appreciated his struggles, and was seeking to help bring some clarity to the issue, said, well, why don’t you go to study in Germany? Why don’t you go study in Germany? So off he was to Marburg. In his most influential teacher there was probably Wilhelm Hermann. Wilhelm Hermann was himself a pupil of one of the most renowned liberal German theologians, Albrecht Ritschl. Rischl is probably the most influential German theologian at the end of the 19th century, towards the end of the 19th century. And Hermon is a star pupil. And he himself then will become something of an influence, ultimately a foil of sorts for Machen. But Hermann becomes teacher to Machen and to some other lesser known figures like Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann. That’s a slight little joke. Those are huge figures. Bultmann becomes, for the middle part of the 20th century, perhaps the most significant New Testament scholar. And Barthes, if you were to ask any systematician or historical theologian, we were just talking about this yesterday, some of us, what figure looms largest in the 20th century in terms of theology? It would be Karl Barth. But Machen went down ultimately a rather different path than Barthes and Bultmann, but they were exposed to the same things with some of the same teachers.

Patten, Armstrong and Machen’s family all wanted him to return from his study in Germany to teach at Princeton. He did so. He did come back in late 1906, but he didn’t do so without some misgivings, and he resolutely refused at that point to seek ordination. In fact, he was not ordained until 1914. So eight years after his return, he wasn’t ordained. He did begin teaching at Princeton, but this meant that he must teach as an instructor and couldn’t teach as an assistant professor or someone in the professorial rank because he hadn’t been ordained and he wasn’t going to seek ordination as long as he didn’t have that certainty, that assurance that he was pressing for, well, let’s think a little bit about what went on in Germany, Hermann and others.

But Hermann particularly shook Machen’s complacent faith and forced him to confront his own remaining unbelief. Machen, after first hearing Hermann, wrote to his mother, I should say that the first time I heard Hermann may almost be described as an epoch in my life. Such an overwhelming personality I think I almost never encountered overpowering in the sincerity of religious devotion. Hermann may be illogical and one sided but I tell you he is alive. Don’t forget that comment. It’s a very telling comment and we need to hear that.

As orthodox as I presume that we are, we need to hear that because a lot of times, particularly laypersons have had very little real up close confrontation with liberalism in all of its various guises and forms. Perhaps some of you hearing Dr. Troxell talk about post modernism and the emergent church thought, wow, that’s some weird stuff. Well, I mean that’s just the tip of an iceberg. All of that is out there and one is exposed to it. But it’s very easy for folk in the churches to think that liberalism is this sort of thing that is terribly unattractive and has blood dripping from its mouth and you can’t imagine why anybody would ever be attracted to it. That’s not the case. It has its appeals, it can be very attractive and it is very attractive to sinful flesh. It’s the liberals who supposedly are kinder than anybody else. There’s a whole host of things that we can say about this. But here’s my point. Machen didn’t just from afar reject liberalism without really knowing what it was like. He came up close to it, sensed its attraction, looked it in the face and said, no, this is wrong. This is not God’s word. But you see, he says Hermann is alive.

Shortly after he wrote to his father, that was to his mother, he wrote to his father about Hermann. I can’t criticize him as my chief feeling with reference to him is already one of deepest reverence. Since I’ve been listening to him, my other studies have for a time lost interest to me. My other faculty members always hate me for this. No, I’m just a little joke there. For Hermann refuses to allow the student look at religion. Listen to this, listen to this. Hermione refuses to allow the student to look at religion from a distance as a thing to be studied merely.

Machen felt as if he was being confronted with something that he hadn’t quite been confronted. Maybe he had been confronted with it, but he hadn’t gotten it. It’s sort of like people will say, my own wife will say to me, I love it. He I was the pastor, she sat under the preaching for 10 years. And now we’ve been 10 years at mid America And I preach a good bit in our church. Our pastor will say something to his sermon. This happened not long ago. And she said, oh, it was so great. When Bruce said that I’d never heard that before. And of course I’m over there thinking, you never heard it before. I’ve said that before. What are you talking about? You know how that is. I’ve never heard that before. Yes, you have. I’ve said it before, I preached it. But that’s the way it works. We hear and then we hear right.

Well, Hermann was impacting him. He was being impacted by this man. And he says Hermann refuses to allow the student to look at religion from a distance as a thing to be studied merely he speaks right to the heart. And I have been thrown into all confusion by what he says. So much deeper in his devotion to Christ than anything I have known in myself during these past few years. I don’t know what at all to say as yet. For Hermann’s views are so revolutionary. So you see where he is.

What precisely was it that Hermann so effectively represented? What were his illogical revolutionary views? What was it that Machen found such a challenge to his orthodoxy? It was the still developing position that gripped Germany in the 1830s, England in the 1860s and America in the 1880s. Historicism, which when applied to the Bible meant that the Bible was not God’s word to man, but man’s time and space conditioned words about God. Do you get what I’m saying here? This is the liberal position is, yes, this contains all kinds of incredible things, but it’s a time and space conditioned word about God, as is all of the sacred writings of all the religions of the world. Maybe this one has a leg up. Maybe this one is a bit more centered. Now how they know that I don’t know, but a bit more centered on something called truth. But to say that it is the word of God to man, no, there really can’t be such a thing. Historicism says everything is so time and place conditioned that God. It’s not possible that God could speak a word that would be invariant and universal in its application.

Well, historicism is that which came to reign after the Enlightenment and yielded what we know as liberalism, modernism, neo orthodoxy, postmodernism. We’ve been hearing about these things. Historicism is the notion that everything is a product. Everything is a product of its time and place, as we say, so that there are no universal and invariant truths. The orthodox would agree that the expression of truth in the Bible. We as orthodox would agree that the Expression of truth in the Bible has a proper historicalness. It has a proper historicalness that we must always take into account. God spoke to particular persons in particular times and places, to be sure, but by such historically situated speaking he also communicated verbally inspired, infallible truth to us all. By historically situated speaking, he also communicated verbally inspired infallible truth to us all, proclaiming to all that he is holy, that we are sinners, and the only way of salvation is in and through His Son, who has done for us what we could never do for ourselves and keeping the law for us and paying the penalty for our law breaking. This is ultimately the burden that Machen will have to deliver, to hold forth.

Well, Machen came to realize more and more those gospel truths that we just spoke about and to dedicate his life to the vigorous propagation and defense of them. But before that, he had to struggle with the historicism that Hermann and others were promoting. Charles Denison, then historian of the OPC at the OPC Semi Centennial in 1986, offered these insights into Machen’s struggle. The Presbyterianism, I think you’ll find this interesting. The Presbyterianism of Maachen’s youth, while possessing a broad cultural vision and enjoying wide societal position and influence, was less distinctly Calvinist than broadly Presbyterian, revering the idea of the church possessing more the aura of respectability than of profound holiness.

Now get what’s being said here, if you would, and recall what’s been said here both in the Hodg and Jaredot talks. In 1869, the Northern Church reunited, and in that reunited church, problems that had been there previously from the New School, theological problems which had been there had not been properly addressed. And theological, theological liberalism of various stripes was infesting that. So by the time Machen was born, things were really cooking. And in the 1870s, we’ll talk just a little bit more about this later, but 80s and 90s, you had all of these problems within the Presbyterian Church. And Denison’s point is that yes, it was Presbyterian, but how Calvinist it was, how committed to the doctrine the Presbyterian Church was is another matter altogether. And his point is, and I think he’s right, that there was declension, there was a falling away from the pattern of sound words, there was a falling away from the truth. Not to say that many in the Presbyterian Church weren’t Calvinists.

But you also have to realize at the time that this church is so central in terms of the nation and of the society. I mean, just the fact that you’re talking about A variety of presidents right around that time. Grover Cleveland, he’s a Presbyterian. He’s buried in the Princeton cemetery. You’re going to have Woodrow Wilson. He’s a Presbyterian. These folk are visiting in Machen’s home. I mean, I live in Chicago area, but I do not have Obama. I mean, that’s Dutch Obama visiting in my home. I don’t know him. We’re not in the same circles. Machen was in these circles, the circles of power that ran the nation. And so Denison says, I think absolutely rightly, the church, this is the old PC USA at the turn of the last century now, we’re saying, had this sort of aura of respectability, but really hearty Calvinism. That’s another matter.

In short, the Baltimore Presbyterianism of the Machen household, as Terry Chrysop also discovered in his work on Machen, likely provided its middle son, Machen, with the proper cultural associations, a genuine reverence for the Bible, along with a solid knowledge of its contents and a foundation of doctrinal correctness. So he had good cultural associations, a genuine reverence for the Bible, along with a solid knowledge of its contents, a foundation of doctrinal correctness, while perhaps at the same time unwittingly grooming him for the kind of upheaval which he experienced in Germany and for which Hermann was the catalyst. Because when he saw somebody who was all alive, it said, that’s not my experience. I haven’t seen that before. And I say this, I mention that to say this, it isn’t enough in our churches. It isn’t enough in this church or any church, is it, Brother Allen, to just sort of have this body of doctrine that we revere and say we believe, but we evidence, if we evidence no liveliness, no heartiness, no passion properly understood in the belief of it or in the living out of it. We need that. We need that evident heart commitment to the Word.

And he saw it in a liberal. And you might say, well, if you read Herman, he’s saying that Hermann loved Christ. I mean, we could just look and say, well, Hermann didn’t properly understand Christ and all that. Yes, it’s easy to see that on the page where Hermann is writing. But if you’re in his lectures, you see, maybe you have a different impression. You see this man and you’re thinking, well, whatever it is he says, exactly, he seems to be alive, which is maybe you can think, which is more than some of the Presbyterians that I know, which is more than me. He sang, I haven’t experienced this. This lively Commitment. And if I believe the truth, why should he be more committed to error than I am to the truth?

Well, the state of the PCUSA, the mainline Northern Presbyterian Church, was itself not in particularly good shape even at the time of Machen’s birth. As we said in 1881. Dennison talks about this, a liberal like Lefferts. Lesher celebrates it in his book the Broadening Church. Lesher talks about what’s happening to the church. Princeton professor and he speaks of the broadening church. And we say, oh, that’s not good. Well, he says it is good. It’s wonderful. This is a great thing that’s happening. But we both agree that this is what’s happening.

Princeton Seminary was engaged in a full court press in the defense of the faith. It is true at this point. But many of the other seminaries, as we’ve seen, were beginning to embrace or had already embraced biblical higher criticism. A number of heresy trials had already occurred or were occurring revolving around such critical claims against the Bible and resulted in ecclesiastical convictions. There was the David swing case in 1874, McCune at Lane in 1877, Briggs at Union in 1893. Henry preserved Smith of Lane in the next year, 1894.

And ever since, as we said, this reunion of old and new school in 69, you recall, we said that was a reunion that was opposed by Charles Hodge. He opposed that reunion even though the rest of the Princetonians supported it. The church had, since that time particularly become more and more infected with doctrinal error. It was not a vigorous, healthy, vibrant church in which Machen was reared, but one more interested at times with maintaining the favor of this world than uncompromisingly standing for the truths of the gospel. To use the language of our ministerial vows, whatever persecution or opposition may arise to it. Upon that account, a minister says that he will stand for the truths of the gospel, whatever persecution or opposition may arise to it. Upon that account.

Such compromise manifested itself in a host of ways in Machen’s life as things developed on in 1903, in the Arminianizing revisions to the Westminster Confession, in the union with the Arminian Cumberland Presbyterians of 1906, and in the FCC of 1908. And that’s not the Federal Communications Commission. It is the Federal Council of Churches, the beginning of a particularly ecumenical movement. You have the Federal Council of Churches, which is a predecessor to the National Council and World Council, which will come later in the 30s and 40s. And also looking towards that movement in 1920 of a union of all the Protestant churches.

Which Warfield looked at this proposed union and it was supported by J. Ross Stevenson of Princeton and others. But Warfield said you could have an anti trinitarian join this group. You don’t even confess the Trinity. And it was a movement similar to what was going on, say in Canada with the United Churches there. And there was this attempt to unite all the Protestant churches with the barest sorts of agreement. It’s hardly surprising then that Machen brought up as he was in a kind of attenuated Presbyterianism, had his faith shaken when he encountered liberalism. You see, part of the lesson for us is we must believe and we must believe heartily and vigorously and live it out in our lives or else we are in danger of any number of competing systems.

Machen emerged from the encounter with Hermann and the like with a rock solid confidence in the certainty of God’s word, going on to write masterworks on the Origin of Paul’s Religion, 1921 and the Virgin Birth, 1930. Both of these books still read quite well. Machen is one of those kinds of writers and I think it’s a mark of an incisive and insightful mind to write in these ways. It’s still reads well.

Machen in the Origin of Paul’s Religion was arguing against all of those who were saying that Paul invented Christianity. Jesus was a simple humble prophet and teacher, but it was Paul who invented Christianity. No, the origin of Paul’s religion is Jesus Christ. And he showed in a sense those two together. Not the kind of division. And of course later divisions have been put between say Paul and the Reformers. That’s part of the new perspective. Well, okay, we’ll say Paul and Jesus were on the same page, but the Reformers misread Paul and you can read Maachen and you see some great answers there to the new perspective.

At one point Machen says in that work, either Jesus and Paul were either the Jews of Jesus and Paul’s day were wrong about the Old Testament or Jesus and Paul were wrong about the Jews of their day. You get that either, and I hope you vote for the Jews were wrong about the Old Testament because we’re told by the new perspective folk that Second Temple Judaism, when the Temple was restored, that was a religion of grace. Well, I grant you that the Old Testament sets forth a religion of grace, but was that grasped by the Jews of that time? Largely, no. That’s the point. So that when Jesus came and Paul ministered, they saw that Judaism of that day did not properly grasp the gracious character. So they not only fought gentile inclusion, but the very gracious character of that salvation. But Maachen gets. You can read that work and see he gets that right. It’s still the best work in many ways on the virgin birth of Christ as well, defending that great doctrine over against the liberal attacks.

And he had also, of course, staunchly defended the five fundamentals that were affirmed particularly by the gas the General Assemblies of 1910, 16 and 23, which is to say the inerrancy of the Bible, the virgin birth of Christ, the vicarious substitutionary atonement of Christ, the satisfied divine justice, the physical resurrection of Christ and the miracles of our Lord as essential, quote, essential doctrines of the word of God.

But none of this came about, and I keep repeating and sort of reflecting back to this, none of this came about without a monumental struggle that lasted far after Machen’s return from Germany until perhaps 1912, after which we see the clear resolution of what had begun in Germany, the conviction that liberalism, attractive and appealing as it may be, was something altogether different from Christianity. I hope you heard that.

After hearing one particularly powerful liberal lecture in Gottingen, Machen wrote his brother author that while Bossuet’s teaching was tantalizing, quote, whether it such liberalism is the Christian faith that has been found to overcome the world is very doubtful. So you see, he’s saying, boy, this isn’t it. Here in seed form is the great argument that Machen will put forth in his 1923 masterwork, Christianity and Liberalism, that Christianity. Here’s his argument that Christianity and liberalism are distinct and competing claims, both of which cannot be true. Liberalism is not just an approach to or a variant of true Christianity. It is rather something else altogether. It is antithetical to Christianity.

Christianity is a supernatural faith, Machen argues, that calls us to trust in the person and work of Jesus Christ, the only redeemer of mankind. Liberalism is a naturalistic program that teaches us that we too ought to aspire to the religious insights and developments of Jesus, who grasped God, God and his love like none other. And what I find so sad these days is when you say, and give something like I gave as the last definition. In other words, I said what? Christianity is a supernatural faith in which Jesus Christ is the only redeemer. And then you give the other definition 20 years ago, 30 years ago, certainly, and more evangelicals would have said, yeah, liberalism is a naturalistic program. It teaches us that we too ought to aspire to the religious insights and the developments of Jesus. We ought to be like Jesus. That’s what Christianity means that he grasped God in his love like none other and he showed us the way so that we can grasp God in his love. And you can say that.

I hate to say this, beloved of the Lord Jesus Christ. Now I speak like I’m preaching to you, but you can say this to evangelical audiences these days and get amens because they don’t know that’s not the gospel. It’s not the gospel. They don’t know that. I’ve just realized this in the last few years more and more clearly. This is what’s happening. They don’t even understand the gospel in the most basic of ways. We need to be preaching it. And I’m afraid, simply standing in your pulpit with a nice suit and having nice hair and. And saying in a nice tone, you have the favor of God. Yeah, yeah, you have the favor of God without ever telling you that as one fallen. First of all, though you’re made in the image of God because you have rebelled in Adam and in your own life against him. You’re under the wrath and curse of God. The law must be preached. We’re under the wrath and curse of God. And one has come to take that curse for us. One has come to undo what Adam did and to do what we could never do. Jesus Christ. And there you preach him. And if you believe and you repent, if your hope is in him and him alone, then you have the favor of God. But just telling people that they have the favor of God without preaching to them the law. And then the true remedy of the gospel and is to seal their fate, it seems to me, is to invite them to remain in the state in which they are, from which they need to repent.

I realize myself to be sinful enough that if in the flesh you just told me I have the favor of God and I don’t believe and I don’t repent. You just say you have the favor. I said thank you very much. I was hoping to hear that. I’m going to do what I want to now. Thanks. See you later, sucker. No, I’m not grateful to just be told the favor if I don’t know how much I need it. And it’s no true preaching. And this is part of what Machen is dealing with. It’s all there. Liberalism comes in lots of dress these days, particularly the. This old liberalism is showing up as evangelicalism. In many corners.

Adolf von Harnack, as we said, another pupil of Rischel, summarized this liberalism as teaching the kingdom of God, which he said is the inner spiritual Presence of God’s rule and power, the kingdom of God, the fatherhood of God and the infinite worth of the human soul, applied to all humans without distinction in this higher righteousness and the command to love, the fatherhood of God, the infinite worth of the human. Are these people on the next episode of Oprah? I mean, it sounds like it. Next up on Oprah, we’ll be talking about the infinite worth of the human soul. I mean, so people can. Oh, I feel spiritual. This is so spiritual. Well, Machen didn’t say this liberalism stuff wasn’t spiritual. He said it was false. It wasn’t Christianity. In other words, all this is to say is that ultimately liberalism reduces Christianity to ethics. Christ in that way of looking at it, Christ was the highest ethical ideal and salvation as such is in imitating him.

Machen looked this humanism that has a great appeal to sinful human flesh right in the face and came to reject it entirely, recognizing man’s plight and the sole remedy for such, not in one who was merely our greatest example, but in one who by his life and death did what we no longer could do and undid what Adam did, as we say.

Machen noted in Christianity and Liberalism that the Jesus of liberal reconstruction, which is what he is, that the Jesus of liberal reconstruction is not the supernatural Redeemer set forth in the Bible as the object of faith, but rather he is to be understood and accepted as the pattern of faith. That is, men ought to exercise the same quality of faith in God that Jesus exercised. But the thing is, again, that used to mark you as not being evangelical, but that’s scarily close to evangelicals these days. That’s where we’ve come. And you say, what is Calvinism’s job these days? Well, very clearly Calvinism ought to be preaching the gospel. Let’s talk about a whole bunch of other things after that. That’s fine. We’ve got to be preaching the gospel. It needs to be recovered. It’s being lost. Oh, yes, it’s being lost in the mainline churches. It was lost there a long time ago. It’s being lost in evangelical churches.

That gentleman that I spoke of earlier, nicely coiffed and suited and wife sitting there in the front seats. I had had people ask me about him some years back before his first best seller came out. So I said, I need to not just give some. I need to watch him. I need to see what’s going on here. And I was astounded as I and my children joined me on several occasions. My wife watching him give him an opportunity. And I did not hear the gospel preached. I did not hear the gospel preached. I was told that I have the favor of God. I was told how wonderful I am. I was told what a winner I am. I wasn’t ever told what a sinner I am and how much I need Jesus Christ alone to save me from everlasting perdition. And that’s just frightening.

And I will say, my children, again, this was probably 8 years ago I was doing this. And my smaller children, even, they were able to critique this and say. One of them said, because there is that little crate at the beginning, this is my Bible. I am what it says I am. And my youngest child said at that point, and we’re now going to close it and pay no more attention to it in the rest of this service. He just came out with that. I’m like, whoa, that’s pretty, right? That’s sad. That’s sad. And the man. There’s the story and there’s the getting into it, and then there’s the verse. I didn’t intend to get into this. It’s just coming out. But I guess I’m close enough to Houston. Houston, we have a problem. But it comes out and there’s a verse. It’s a pretext. The text is a pretext for what I want to say. I’m sovereign over the word. No, you’re not. We’re under the word. We’re not over it. We’re to obey it.

Machen dedicated his life to striking a fatal blow to these notions of liberalism. The Machen that we all know and love, who opposed the moderating efforts of J. Ross Stevenson at Princeton, who opposed the Plan of Union of 1920 of all the Protestant churches, who opposed the Auburn affirmation of 1924, 2324, the recommendations of the Commission of 1925. If you don’t know what all these things are, you can get something like the Meter Hart book Fighting the Good Faith or Ed Ryan, Presbyterian Conflict. I don’t know if any of those are back there right now. They may or may. What’s that? The Hartmether? Yeah. The reorganization of Princeton of 2729, rethinking missions, 31. The unconstitutional declaration of the GA of 1934. In short, all of the liberalizing and modernizing tendencies of his day. The Machen who stood against those. And you know, that was a Machen who had earlier felt the attraction of such liberalism in a church that had capitulated to it significantly since the Civil War or War between the States. I’m just looking at Nick to see what he wants me to say there.

But now, where did Machen get the strength to resist his study of the Scripture? Growing in faith by the power of the Holy Spirit after he returned to teach at Princeton in 1906, that convinced him more and more that the Bible was the very word of God and that the historicism of his day was wrong. Here’s the answer. Here’s how Terry Crissa puts it. Machen’s resolution of the dilemma presented by biblical criticism was to adhere to an approach to the Bible that was historical without being historicist. Machen came more and more to recognize that historicists had presuppositions. Remember we talked about that the other day. Presuppositions that were anti supernatural and that their rejection of God’s superintendence of the inspiration of His Word was of a piece with their rejection that that he actively governed and sustained the world.

In other words, Machen rejected historicism because he came to better understand and to embrace divine providence. God guides everything. The liberals said, how can this possibly be a word from God? And Machen said, if there is a God who reigns and rules and orders and decrees all things in accordance with the counsel of his own will, how can he not give such a word? Is anything impossible? So as others have said, as other apologists have said, it always goes back to the question of is there a God? With the students when I teach apologetics, they’ll often say, well, X isn’t really arguing against God, they’re arguing against the inspiration of Scripture. No, it ultimately always goes back to the question of God himself. Because if there is a God, if that is granted and he’s of the king character that we understand him to be, how could he not give a word that yes, is through fallible men, but that itself is infallible and inerrant, authoritative and inspired by Him. I mean, what kind of God do you believe in? So Machen understood that and he really grappled with.

And you see this grappling and two things let me mention. We see by what Machen wrote in 1912 in Christianity and Culture. Nick, you’re over there. Are there any volumes left of the Hart selected shorter? Is there a volume left of that? Yes, there’s one volume. You can read some of this in there. In 1912 article Christianity and Culture. In the 1915 article History and Faith, he had thoroughly imbibed Machen. We see from Those articles of 1912, Christianity, culture, 1915 history and fish that he had thoroughly imbibed a view that a sovereign God governed all of history and that such a God could and did give us his word without error. It is by believing the infallible word that Machen attained certainty, the certainty that allowed him to stand Luther like against the errors of the PC USA and modernism more broadly in his day. And so to encourage us to like faithfully.

Machen’s faithfulness, clarity and certainty were never more evident than in his justly famous last words sent to John Murray. I’m so thankful for active obedience of Christ. No hope without it. If that sounds a little stilted, it’s a telegram, remember? So if you’re thinking he didn’t know how to use articles and so forth stuff, stop. I say that only in a telegram way. Stop. What comforted and gave a certain assurance to the dying Machen was not reflection on his life, but faith in the one who had not only died for his sins, but who had perfectly kept the whole law in his place. So he says to John Murray, I’m so thankful for active obedience. For the active obedience of Christ. No hope without it. Here’s the only basis for certainty for us all, that we’re accepted in the Beloved. That we cannot please God by our own efforts. In fact, we never could, even by his grace, please him more than he is already pleased with us in Christ. Here’s how you can attain certainty. Believe the testimony that God has given us in His Word to the salvation that we have in him who is the living Word. This is the legacy. This is the revived Calvinism of John Gresham. Machen. Thank you.